


What would Grace say?

by asparagusmama



Series: Tales of the companions [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Grief, History, post Rosa, settling into the TARDIS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-27 04:15:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16695250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagusmama/pseuds/asparagusmama
Summary: Despite all the wonders he's seen, how amazing a person the Doctor is, he can't stop missing his wife like a physical pain...





	What would Grace say?

He asked himself the question several times a day. She would have loved it – the travel, the people, the aliens – he meant the other people – the also people. She would have loved the TARDIS, bigger on the inside, the stars, the planets, the amazing things they had seen so far. She would have been so proud of how her grandson was flourishing and growing as a person.

Ryan missed his Nan so much, that was so obvious. It hurt him almost as much as missing his wife did, to see the loss and hurt in the boy. If only he could reach him. God knew, he'd been trying for years. But he had never felt so connected, so close, so protected, so much like blood didn't matter, that Ryan was his own grandson, as he had in that moment when the racist bastard had smacked his grandson about the face. It had taken every bit of self control not to whack that piece of shit right back.

But he had seen Grace, her eyes sad and wise, shaking her head gently at him. That wasn't the answer. We have to be better. It was what she had taught her children, and Ryan. It was what her parents had taught her when they first arrived in England, Grace's Mum to be a midwife in the brand new NHS, her father to drive a bus in Bristol. He had that in common with his father in law. Not that they had met, both had sadly passed years before.

Buses. He had struggled when he first had to give up driving the buses. He got it, he was sick, and the passengers safety came first. In hindsight, it was easier to focus on not being allowed to drive a bus than think about the cancer growing inside of him, the chemotherapy making him feel even more ill. A friend on the ward had said it's like modern day witchcraft, they pump the poison into us, hoping it kills the evil possessing us, before it kills us. Sadly he didn't make it.

Bus. Oh God, Ryan at the back of the bus like that, the stupidity and pettiness as well as evil of the segregation laws.

It's history, Graham, Grace would say. That women did good. She was so brave, not getting up like that.

She didn't get up for me Grace. For me!

He was so ashamed.

But it had to happen, Grace reminded him in his head. We never had it so bad,but in America, people had to be so brave. History had to happen,his imaginary Grace went on in his mind, but in the voice of the Doctor.

Graham rolled over and switched on the bedside light. He was never going to get to sleep. Yet again. Unless he was exhausted – and these travels in the TARDIS trying and failing to get home to Sheffield in the right time and place, could be exhausting all right, with all the running, all the danger – he could not sleep. The minute he closed his eyes he saw Grace fall from that crane.

Over and over and over.

Falling and falling.

As if he could stop it, catch her, stop her dying.

Falling.

He never let himself remember her smashed on the ground, telling him to be brave. He couldn't bear it.

He pulled on his dressing gown and slippers that had appeared in the bedroom on his first night on board the TARDIS, and got up. He had got quite a handle on the twists and turns of the TARDIS's maze of corridors, pink and white and roundelled.

Roundelled. Was that a word of did the Doctor just make it up like he suspected she made quite a lot of things up?

He went to the library and found a book on Rosa Parks, and another on the American civil rights movement in general.

He looked up, as if Grace were standing in front of him. He couldn't quite actually see her in his imagination. He was afraid to remember, for then he saw her lying on the ground under that crane. “I might have been the person she refused to get up for, but the way she looked at our Ryan, I think he said something to her to make her brave enough to stay sitting. You should be proud of your grandson. And he met Martin Luther King. Imagine that!”

I am proud of you both, his imaginary Grace said from behind him, kissing the top of his head.

If only she were really here.

Graham absorbed himself in the books.

Miscegenation. That's what his and Grace's relationship was, what they were to those bigoted, white, Southern Americans back then. The fact that they made it illegal was one thing, and didn't surprise him. But that they had a word, a disgusting sounding word, that made such love sound like a sickness, a perversion, a mental illness, made him sick to the stomach. He supposed homosexuality had been looked at in that way too, back then. Didn't make either right. Interracial sex. Stupid words that made his love seem a disgusting thing like bestiality or paedophilia. What was wrong with these people who made such laws and believed such things. There was only one sentient race on Earth, the human race. As far as he knew. He liked to keep an open mind about elephants and dolphins and whales. He didn't have to travel with the Doctor to understand that on an instinctive level. Maybe racism was a mental illness if people genuinely couldn't get that.

But it wasn't, it was about power, amount insecure people holding power. Like men threatened by the #metoo thing a while back, or women in power, or clever women like Mary Beard.

Graham loved Mary Beard. Didn't she get stick for pointing out all the Nubian soldiers who would have been stationed on Hadrian's Wall and married local Celtic women?

“Dear Lord!” Graham said to himself after a while, throwing the book down and rubbing his face. The 'miscegenation' laws had been more widespread than he could have guessed at, not even confined to just the deep south, and weren't even overthrown until 1967 by the Supreme Court declaring it unconstitutional in the Case of Loving vs Virginia.

1967! And no doubt there was difficulty in being in such relationships in parts of the States, even to this very day. He had never been so glad to be where and when he was. Or had been. Was from. He suddenly felt an overwhelming wave of homesickness.

But what was the point if Grace wasn't there? He'd not expected to find love again so late in life. Nor had she. But they fit. They loved each other gently, but passionately all the same. Not the obsessively fire of youth, of his first wife, of her first husband. But still, passionate and deeply.

And if they had been honest, it was Grace that they both expected to be widowed, to be left behind. Three years now in remission. But that was all it was. Remission.

Now he had been there, in 1950s Southern America, looked into the eyes of bigoted white men, men who believed their love was a sickness. Men in police uniform who were prepared to act on that belief with violence, more men prepared to kill for that belief.

No. Who were frightened and threatened by their love. That was why they were so violent with their misguided, hateful beliefs.

And the sad thing was, the frightening thing was, the sinking, horrible feeling that however normal and true his and Grace's love was for each other, at home, in his own time, in Trump's USA, there were those same hateful, bigoted, white people, frightened and threatened by it, hanging on to lies of their superiority to keep them feeling powerful, when they were anything but.

It wasn't even if everything had been perfect back home either, some people hadn't approved and felt like they could subtly indicate their disapproval. A few elderly women at Grace's church sucked their teeth at them at few times, and comments like 'it's a bit sudden' had been made by a few mutual acquaintances, and then there was that oh so polite smile to your face but tut of disapproval once your back was turned from occasional older white people at the supermarket. But attitudes like that were old, out of time, and the people knew they had no right to them, certainly no right to express their dated disapproval out loud.

“We have to be the best,” Grace always had said. “Show we are better. My parents taught me that, back when they came over, it was 'no dogs, no Irish, no coloured', but they always smiled, were always polite, and better than those people. Some women wouldn't let Mum touch them, but come them in labour, they'd let her touch 'em alright, no problem. People spat at Dad on the bus when he first got up her in Sheffield – and back when he arrived in Bristol the white bus drivers didn't want him, and the other New Commonwealth people. But other people cared, they boycotted the buses in Bristol over the white drivers striking over black and Asian drivers. There is a monument in Bristol bus station. One day we might go see it. I took Dad when it was unveiled, and he met up with all his old workmates. There is always good and bad people, so we have to be good in front of the bad, set an example.”

They never made that holiday to the west country, never saw where Grace was born.

He agreed with her about being the best, about being polite and kind. But sometimes was it enough? He'd grown up in West London, and he remembered the sometimes violent demonstrations against the National Front in his youth in the seventies, the riots in Brixton in the eighties, the murder and botched investigation of Stephen Lawrence in the early nineties. 

Things had changed, and the Stephen Lawrence inquiry had done a lot to change things. Look at Yaz, in the police. But still, Ryan got stopped and questioned on a Friday or Saturday night out more than his white friends, didn't he? And things were worse for Yaz's people, weren't they? Girls got their scarves ripped off. Then there was the EDL, picketing the Mosque a couple of years back.

Graham felt sick. How did you stop the hate? How did you stop the prejudice? Back home, it wasn't black and white, it was complex, and growing again. Sometimes it felt to him to be just like it had been in the late seventies, early eighties, but it was Muslims and East Europeans who were attacked, or even murdered or their homes firebombed.

But he had to take comfort it was all against the law, and the police would prosecute every single hate crime they could, and people shared the crimes on social media, and recorded it on their phones for evidence, and stood in to protect people. He had mates from the buses who had stopped the bus to kick off some foul mouthed moron mouthing off at a Bangladeshi lady or a Polish kid.

Not like where they had just been, where the hate was the law. He felt so sick. You could make the hate illegal, but you couldn't really stop prejudice, could you?

He'd been to other galaxies, other planets, other times, but he hadn't seen the kind of prejudice humans showed to each other for a different colour, a different language or accent, a different religion. He'd seen people who were reptiles living with humanoids of different shapes and colours, even people who were walking plants, all mixing up together just like he thought people in the UK did, especially London, his home city.

Or used to. Things were getting worse again at home. Did he really want to go back?

Why did it have to be him, the white man who needed that seat Rosa Parks was sitting on?

All his life he had been giving up his seat for women of any colour when he was on the bus as a passenger, he wasn't sure if he'd even noticed what colour they might have been, whether they had a sari, a burka, or a mini skirt. Well, maybe the latter! Older women, pregnant women, women with buggies or small children, disabled women. Old and disabled men too, but more women than men seemed to travel by bus, especially in the middle of the day, he found. And as a driver, he'd make some spotty, thoughtless, youth do the same.

Until he'd moved a few years before he got sick, when he was alone and needed something different, he'd lived in London all his life, where every colour, every language, and every culture, and very religion, rubbed along together, and as a driver you just didn't notice. You'd notice things like they were tourists, or country bumpkins up in town for the day, or if they were fare dodging, or if a fight was about to happen, or so drunk that they didn't know where they were going, but Londoners were Londoners, wherever their genetic history came from. After meeting and travelling with the Doctor, he was beginning to suspect some of those Londoners might even have genetic history from a lot further afield than anyone could guess at it.

Why did it have to be him?

“Why me Grace?” he asked the TARDIS library, before putting his head in his hands to weep. “Why you Grace? Why did you have to leave me alone? I don't know if I can go on alone without you!”

**Author's Note:**

> Earnest sociology students in my faculty in the early to mid 1990s: What's it like being in a mixed race relationship?  
> Me: (straight-faced): How did you know I was an alien? It's supposed to be a secret!  
> Me: (to self) FFS, it's no big deal, it's just two people who have the same ups and downs as anyone else!  
> Also me: (produces papers on the sociology of mixed race relationships...)


End file.
